In the Deep South, the first question you're likely to face is what church you go to.

It may surprise outsiders, but not Southerners, to know that for a lot of people the answer has to do not with a church, but a synagogue.

Shalom Y'all: Images of Jewish Life in the American South is a warm piece of work, augmented with 137 black and white photographs, that offer a glimpse into the lives of Jews throughout the Deep South: South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Missouri.

These are stories of the descendants of immigrants, mostly from Europe, who defied the traditional notion of Jews arriving via Ellis Island and settling in big cities such as New York and Chicago. Instead, these people made their lives in the land of bumpy roads and notable accents. There they became politicians, and businessmen, such as clothing storeowners, cotton merchants and shoe salesmen.

This book is not a comprehensive historical account, an encyclopedia of Jewish history with statistics and documentation of anti-Semitism and achievements.

It is certainly a feel-good coffee-table book, though, offering a snapshot into the lives of a handful of Southerners and their experiences.

There are interviews with Jewish residents, such as Ilsa Goldberg from Greenwood, Miss., who explains that their kosher meat is shipped in from Memphis, while the Jews in Memphis don't trust their butcher so they have their meat shipped in from Atlanta.

Included are anecdotes such as the one from a man in Cary, Miss.: "One evening, the day Sandy Koufax announced that he wouldn't pitch in the World Series on Yom Kippur, some workers on my father's farm knocked on the door and asked him: `You're Jewish, can you talk to Sandy Koufax about this and convince him that it's all right to play?'"

Or from this woman in Morgan City, La.: "My family believed in land because it made them realize they were not in the ghetto. They were part of the civilization of America."

These Jews became part of the South; Here, booths set up in back yards, a tradition to commemorate the fall holiday of Sukkot, are adorned with cotton and soybeans and a popular dish includes lox and bagels with cheese grits.

They tried to become part of the South. Mortimer Cohen, of Montgomery, Ala., says his grandfather, who owned a shoe store, volunteered for Confederate Army, but was turned away.

"Said they needed him more as a cobbler to make shoes than they needed him to fight," Cohen said. "They could get people to fight, but they didn't have anybody else to make shoes."

They witnessed the ugliness of the South, as well.

"Before my daddy married he was working in a shoe store," tells a woman from Hattiesburg, Miss. "He used to see the KKK parades and he could recognize the men by the shoes he had sold them. He could see their shoes under the sheets."

This is all captured by photographer Bill Aron, whose work has been showcased around the country including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Pictures and details of the healthy Jewish communities of Shreveport, La., and Birmingham, Ala., contrast with a heartbreaking glimpse of communities that have vanished, and the last orthodox synagogue in Mississippi.

There are also synagogues such as the one in Lexington, Miss., which only has services once a month (the children travel 60 miles to Jackson for Sunday school). And there's the shul in Donaldsonville, La., that has been turned into a hardware store. A cemetery remains nearby; it was watched over by the last remaining congregant until his death in 1994.

But a picture of grinning 5-year-old Russian twins from New Orleans clutching challah, a bread, that shows that it is really a small world: the traditions, sometimes different, are the same for Jews everywhere.

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4557.